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Kris offers a fresh perspective on the purpose of Nintendo's hardware. Do you think developers will be up to the task when the company's next console arrives?
"We saw a kind of motion-controls 'gold rush' on the Wii where many, many companies integrated the feature in a crass, thoughtless, or nominal way. [...] 3D is no different, and just as it was before, Nintendo has to show people how to do this stuff."
So wrote Penny Arcade's Tycho recently on the subject of Super Mario 3D Land, and that brought back to mind a thought I had when Nintendo revealed the Wii U: In the post-GameCube era, Nintendo no longer designs hardware; it designs puzzles.
And most developers fail them.
The first test came with the Nintendo DS, and to be sure, most were baffled by what was, at the time of its reveal, only a nebulous collection of seemingly arbitrary ideas. Two screens...because why the hell not! One of them is a touch pad but only one for some reason! Also, there's a microphone, but we're not really sure why yet; we'll get back to you on that! It's not hard to see why developers didn't know what the hell to do with it -- even for years after its release.
Nor did it help that Nintendo didn't much lead by example, with Super Mario 64 DS being just a Nintendo 64 game with crummy touch-screen controls padded on. What followed was an extended period of game development experimentation to figure out just exactly what the DS was but also the beginning of an unlikely success story. Nintendo gambled big with the bizarre DS, and when they started to prove its concept with their own games, it paid off. Who could have guessed so many people wanted to scratch the shit out of virtual puppies with a stylus? That made the path for Nintendo clear: double-down.
...Okay, that's a pretty adorable puppy.
The Wii, of course, was almost exactly a DS repeat: weird, new motion controller without a lot of concrete examples of how developers should actually use it, with Nintendo's major launch game being The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess...a GameCube game with waggle controls padded on. And then came the 3DS, which took a handheld that developers had only barely begun to understand and added a third visual dimension just to make it that much more difficult to make awesome games on it. This is almost literally applicable to a "Spock playing 3D chess" metaphor.
And now the Wii U is the purest manifestation of this new design philosophy-to-date.
